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McMurtry’s “Rhino Ranch”

Reading the last installment of our hero’s late-life adventures, I began to wonder if Duane should have been named Randy. Even in his sixties, the guy seems overrun with carnal needs and therefore has instant relations with horny nymphs and errant lesbians and other fantasy girls.

He’s some sort of graying chick magnet who manages to connect with women even randier than himself. They all talk a good game then tend to become servile to him and romantically turn him lose in all directions. If one leaves, another pops up. He’s bewildered.

Duane’s last hurrah is a deceptive porn star who somehow works in the oil business. She will do anything and everything in explicit detail but no penetration with Duane until he has a vasectomy. Guess what our randy hero does.

Along comes a modest, handy-with-dinner Thai girl who (like Annie in the last book) gets to Duane’s heart through his stomach. And then there is leggy K.K. the ball-busting organizer behind the “save the rhinos” organization. And toward book’s end it’s another pretty young thing in cutoffs who wants to serve him, too. Surprisingly, by this time Duane begins to turn them down. He’s cooked. Put a fork in him.

“Rhino’s” last few pages speed through a series of untimely deaths, depleting the cast. What has seemed like a screenplay is over. We will no longer see Duane. To do so would mean to go back and re-read “Texasville,” the four-inch one I started but skipped past.

With Duane gone, the family future is left to grandson Willy, the only one who has made it in the world of successful and intellectual people, who are oft-alluded to by Honor and K.K. as players in a sort of privileged and venal playground that exists outside the simple limitations of the one blinking traffic light in Thalia, Texas.